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Users may never have to read news again in their lives, as artificial intelligence can process all the information on the web and provide on-demand summaries.
It's a nightmare for media moguls as Google and other companies experiment with so-called generative AI, which generates new content based on past data.
General AI is a type of artificial intelligence that is programmed to automatically generate new content such as text, images, audio and video. Google began rolling out its new search engine powered by general AI in May, after industry experts questioned the tech giant’s future prominence in providing information to consumers following the rise of OpenAI’s conversational chatbot (ChatGPT).
The tool, called Search Generative Experience (SGE), uses generative AI to generate summaries in response to a number of search queries. These summaries then appear at the top of Google's search homepage, with links for readers to learn more.
Google says the AI-generated overviews are aggregated from multiple websites with links designed for further research. Google says SGE is an optional experiment for users to help it develop and improve the product, and incorporates feedback from news publishers.
If media outlets want to prevent Google's AI from using their content to help generate those summaries, they'll have to use the same tool that prevents them from appearing in Google's search results, making them virtually invisible on the web.
The still-evolving product — which is now available in the US, India and Japan — has raised concerns among media companies as they try to figure out where they stand in a world where AI could dominate how users find and pay for information, according to four major media companies.
Those concerns include website traffic, whether media outlets are still considered sources of information appearing in SGE news summaries, and the accuracy of those summaries. In particular, media outlets want to be compensated for the content that tech companies use.
Forrester Research senior analyst Nikhil Lai said that SGE will certainly reduce organic traffic for news organizations and they will have to consider other ways to determine the value of that news. However, he believes that the reputation of media organizations will still be maintained because their links appear on SGE.
Media outlets said they had worked to improve their websites to show up prominently in traditional Google searches, but they did not have enough information to do the same for the new SGE summaries.
According to Tin Tuc newspaper